Developed through a collaboration with the website Skeptical Science, Reality Drop curates hundreds of online news articles daily for articles that demand a response—whether it’s a misleading quote from a climate denier or a heated debate raging in the comments section.

So, it seems John Cook is not only in the conspiracy theory business, but also now in the comment spamming business for websites worldwide. Not only that, but it appears they were trying to involve the Met Office through a “Special Thanks” statement, though the Met Office says they’d never heard of it. Barry Woods says in comments at Lucia’s:

I asked Met Office’s Chief Press officer about it, (Dave Britton) he rang me back and said he had not heard of it, they are not officially involved in it, and he will be enquiring why they get a special thanks for their supposed ‘contribution’.

I have an email into John Cook asking him how much Al Gore paid him to make this Astroturfing software. I’ve been given a number by somebody who should be in the know, but I want to confirm with Cook. [Update: Cook responded that he was not paid anything and that the content he provided was given for free under a Creative Commons license. When I pointed out that his website has a Copyright John Cook 2013 on the bottom of each SkS webpage, he stated that he’ll make a change to the entire website. – Anthony]

UPDATE3: For anyone with websites, the simplest way to block these auto-bot SPAM faux comments from Al Gore and John Cook is to put “clmtr.lt” as a blocked web address in your system SPAM filter. I’ve done that for WUWT and recommend all other climate blogs do the same. These aren’t comments from real people, they are bot-generated, so there’s no moral issue with automatically sending them to the bit bucket IMHO.

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I had been given some insight into Al Gore’s relaunched “Reality Drop” this weekend and planned to write an additional article beyond the initial chuckle here: Al Gore’s Reality Drop – Climate Change to Destroy Music? where one of the promoters is laughably worried that global warming will unleash some sort of Don Maclean-Al Goreian music killing vortex, and we’ll see a global Day the Music Died. No pie for you!

Lame.
The struggle is to maintain the morale of the troops, not to increase the size of the army. The attacks by the warmists on the MSM, Obama and others for being anti-climate are interesting: these are supposed to be on their side by the skeptics. So who are the warmist supporters by the warmist position? If you define the warmist friends by those they don’t attack, there would seem to be very few of them.
The governments of many nations, unfortunately, have so little talent in budgeting that they need to increase government revenue in a way that does not make it appear to be incompetence following inability. That’s where the carbon taxes come in: we don’t do this because we want to, but because we HAVE to. And for that story to fly, there has to be a threat of CAGW.
Regardless of political or scientific belief, the governments have an interest in pushing the CAGW story. Not in doing anything constructive about reducing carbon emissions, but in a story that justifies increased taxation.

This is great fun. Spamming sites like Mother Jones with mindless comments, getting points for it, and seeing how close I can walk the line to outright mockery in my segues.
Don’t click on that Lucia Liljegren’s persons links, she-uh gotz no warmy-green cred! Follow philfree’s C.R.A.P. drops instead! Droppin’ reality like a dead head drops acid!http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/forward-on-climate-change-protests

I had to laugh at the comment someone that someone made that oil sands were 86% worse in terms of GHG emissions than conventional oil. That is about what they said about coal. Having worked in this area for 14 years, I have studied the GHG emissions for numerous fuel production pathways. Literature generally agrees that the additional production energy and process energy for oil sands add 20% more CO2 emissions to that pathway. Argonne NL, NREL, and MIT sources for this if you are interested. The really bad fuels though are those derived from palm oil. Some palm plantations carved out of rainforests can have GHG emissions 8X those of conventional fuels. So the environmentalists can be their own worst enemy.
And with wind and solar energy also causing more harm than good, when are people going to realize that you have to have control on these activities if you want to not harm the environment more than with alternatives than with fossil fuels and energy.

Read Lucia’s page on this; if you have the energy, help her become the Master of Reality, or whatever.
Al Gore is engaging in a modern propaganda effort employing all media, including Bot-on-Bot action. It’s quite stunning how, despite the most intensive and well funded propaganda campaign since a certain H. Dooorbells, the Warmistas just can’t seem to get it done.
But, remember they have already scammed hundreds of billions, so their program is successful in one way.

Rujholla says:
March 5, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Do we do the cause of open scientific research any good by stooping to their level and trying to game an admittedly idiotic system?
—————
Aw, I don’t look at it like that. It’s supposed to be a game, isn’t it? I admit, it’s juvenile for me to take such glee in it, sure. If I can’t laugh at stuff like this I’d go insane. I mean, worse than I already am. 🙂

” Rujholla says:
March 5, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Do we do the cause of open scientific research any good by stooping to their level and trying to game an admittedly idiotic system?”
Oh yes! Gore’s latest lunacy has NOTHING to do with scientific research.

Reality Droppings
An exiting new conception of information sharing!
Mama Bird Gore is busy reGORgitating ill digested chunks to the nest full of fragile baby birds…. Who learn to fly off to bombard the webscape with ther messy bird droppings.

lucia liljegren (@lucialiljegren) says: March 5, 2013 at 11:45 am “They suspended my account.”
Predictable, those Gorebots are. But we wonder how much more of that it takes before one of them loses all faith in their system and marches over to FoxNews or TheDailyCaller or WUWT and spills the beans on the amount of reality they were directed to suspend in order to keep Gore’s efforts afloat.
You’d think that they would have at least erased the material on their Twitter page https://twitter.com/RealityDrop/ prior to Feb 28 before announcing their “exciting new tool”, lest anyone obviously see it was not new at all.

Dr. Bob
Did you take into account the fact that burining hydrocarbons produces H2O which is vastly more efficient at absorbing IR radition? But, since there is so much H2O in the atmosphere already that the increase is just damped out. Thus the entire effect of burning hydrocarbons on climate = zero. The only possible bad actor is coal since it has so little hydrogen associated with it.

I’d like to have read Lucia’s take on it too, but sadly I am being blocked again from her site; it has happened several times over the last two years or so, for no reason that I can imagine, so have removed her site from my bookmarks.

ALIENISTA: recommended reading for environmental alarmists
Speculative thought, not shored up by experimental evidence, is not science. Policy should never be based on it.
The history of the 20th century shows the mischief that comes from public policy based on pseudo-science. Examples are: the geopolitics that explained a German March to the East as a natural Darwinian process; the eugenics of Nazis; the Marxist planned economy that misruled Russia for seven decades. Brazilians have a saying that intellectuals would have exterminated mankind, were it not for a ballast of common sense possessed by ordinary folk.
This feeling is illustrated in a parody, Alienista, written long ago by Machado de Assis, the greatest of Brazilian writers. Mistaken policy takes course in Itaguai, an obscure community, 75 km west of Rio de Janeiro, where a renowned medical doctor has a practice. Devoted to medical research, he becomes interested in psychology, a popular topic at a time (1880s) when German researchers (Wundt et al) claimed to have based it on empirical evidence, as an exact science. The doctor persuades city hall to support an asylum for the insane. It would lock up dangerous people and would treat mental disorders of others; the doctor would gain guinea pigs for his experiments in the worthy cause of the advancement of science. Over time, a great number of citizens get interned on doctor´s orders, but the authorities do nothing. Scientific judgment should not be questioned by laymen. A rebellion led by a barber is crushed. The doctor changes his mind and discharges all patients. His new doctrine holds that most people have some degree of insanity, a condition that should be rated as normal; the perfectly sane are the abnormal ones who should be interned. Again, the authorities do nothing; politics should not trump science. In the end, the doctor frees all patients, declares himself the only sane man in town, and becomes the sole dweller of the asylum. The vicar was right; he had always noted that the doctor was the only madman in the parish.

From the link I posted earlierBut while temperatures would have been far more forgiving on Ellesmere Island island in the mid-Pliocene, the region’s high latitude means that the camels, along with other plants and animals, would have had to have endured nearly six months of darkness each year through the winter months.
Caribou move. Why not “other plants and animals”?

There seems a simple way to address this. I have connected to a few of the sites mentioned, and have added the following comment:
The following auto-generated ‘rebuttal’ to this piece has been put up on Al Gore’s new anti-denier web site for mindless warmists to reproduce. I enclose it here so that readers may recognise comments including it:
“…………………………………………………………………..”
I think that this process could be automated fairly easily, but even a manual addition to a few forums should prove acutely embarrassing. May I encourage readers to join in the fun occasionally…?

If the link contains clmtr.lt it’s almost certainly human dropped spam. Beyond that: If the comment is short, it’s probably just cut and pasted from the reality drops comment generator. Other features that elevate the chance it’s a human comment spam: Doesn’t really make any sense in context, and doesn’t address any specific comment or statement in the post.
Most news sites can effectively block this by blocking links to “clmtr.lt”. (Let’s see if Anthony blocks me!)

We have three tents in the alarmist camp.
In one tent are the Manns and the Trenberths, the ones who still pretend they’re doing science.
In the second tent are the Oreskeses and the Lewandowskys, the would-be eugenicists of the warmist community.
And in the final tent are the Gores and the Debens, they’re just there for the bucks.

Suspended accounts?
AlGore has suspended all critical faculties to promote this one. It is so cringeworthy, inane and senseless you think the penny would drop. But no, he lends his face to it too!
It is unlikely to end up a bot war…since even most greenie zealots are unlikely to ‘reality drop’ for shame.
The more I think about it the more it seems a reality ‘dump’.

I just love the fact that now you can call out astroturfers by comparing their cut/paste comments 🙂
“Hi, I’m a reality denier, and here is some information from people I’ve outsourced my rational thinking processes to: blah, blah, blah”

Gosh I would love to play this game but unfortunately due to the fact that I have a weak heart I suspect that the excitement might be too much. I had better just stick to bunji jumping and bare knuckle boxing.

James Allison says:
March 5, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Mark Bofill says:
March 5, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Did wot u suggested but couldn’t find u listed on the leader board WUWT??
—————–
Alas, I suck; haven’t ranked as a leader. I’m simply not as good as dropping reality on people as Lucia. Mostly I was just dropping C.R.P. I think. You’ll find me as ‘philfree27’ though, not as Mark Bofill. None of the other ‘leaders’ seemed to be using real names, I didn’t either.
Still, I want to thank everyone who helped! I’ve gotten badges indicating that I’m a Tub Thumper, a Change Maker, a Dot Connector, and a Heat Seeker so far! I’m sure none of it would’ve been possible without your help and support people, thanks so much!

It took me about 30 minutes to get enough points to vote…just copy and paste the url they want you paste in the comments into a new tab and get 100 click back points each time… and now I’m deciding if articles they link to on climate change are a “Reality” or a “Myth”. I don’t think too many people are actually spamming (there are only a few people voting) as most of the sites require you to register an account. I think most of the top “players” just did the same trick as I did to get on the leader board.

I stopped engaing with the Guardian website because blatant, irrelevant bots kept disrupting any debate.
I have no axe to grind over the size of Government. But I greatly doubt the impact (immediate or long-term) of CO2 emissions compared to other problems, like the weather. So the policy debates were interesting.
Then they were swamped by “people” who are programmed to put the worst possible spin in any option but the most sustainable. With no definition of what ‘sustainable’ means.
And I remember the debates on externalities; how are they defined, who is responsible for the commons, why can greens see things that the market can’t, who is responsble for any mis-costing of exteranlities…
Sigh. Those were good debates. But they became impossible as one cost was automatically defined as infinitely greater than every other consideration. Even ethics and integrity were abandoned over the Gleick affair as ‘the greater good was so much greater’.
The spambots enforced the unthinking, new orthodoxy by weight of numbers.
Still, the Guardian boosted its ad revenue by looking the other way when their readership figures were artiifcially inflated. So I guess they deserve to fail.

Bishop Hill confirms in writing:
“Dave Britton, the press officer at the Met Office, writes to say that they have no idea why Al Gore’s people think the Met Office is involved.”
What is interesting of course, is that Al Gore went to Skeptical science for his ‘soundbite’, why not a scientific institution, for example!! probably because they would not bring themselves so low to create the anti-science propagande taht SkS spews out..
so they try to latch on to tjhe credibility of the UK Met Office.. yet the Met Office has never heard of the project, and would run a mile form being involved with such an obvious political website, as Al Gore’s project…These guys clearly are concerned about social media, blog, twitter, facebook, online comments, but they utterly fail to understand it… Whilst infantalising the public.

Thanks katabasis1. I had noticed the antagonistic slant of many articles on the Guardian website recently. The Guardian’s stablemate, The Obeserver, had a similar twitter scandal for the same apparent purpose.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/1
But that seems fine to me. Challanging orthodox or established views is a valuable function of a broadsheet. And if the Guardian group wants to generate ad revenue by having a lively debate then good on it.
My complaint is that the climate debate isn’t live. It is a puppet play by robots.
This has two original faults.
Firstly, there is no chance for the debate to progress or opinions to modify each other or stimulate or grow as the debaters aren’t alive.
Secondly, the ad revenues are obtained by deceit. Automated computer algorithms will not buy the advertised products. Therefore, hyping readership figures with spambots is theft from (or fraud on) the advertisers.
That is why the Guardian deserves to fail.

“But that seems fine to me. Challanging orthodox or established views is a valuable function of a broadsheet. And if the Guardian group wants to generate ad revenue by having a lively debate then good on it.”
– That’s a fair point, however I wish many of its most dedicated fans would stop asserting that it is somehow a paragon of journalistic integrity. As the article above notes, the more controversial pieces are light on fact-checking…

Hilarious! I particularly enjoyed Lucia’s comment (on her site) about the Terms of Service. Apparently, bots, cheating etc are strictly prohibited, from a site which is essentially about using bots to cheat.
If Al Gore paid for this lame piece of software, I have a great deal on a bridge that he might be interested in …

Anthony, WUWT is a science blog, rightly and repeatedly awarded.
One of the reasons it is superior to blogs such as Tamino’s is that it aims to be open to every view or argument or piece of evidence. (With the exception of the ‘sky dragons’, who are both wrong and spamming, but I bet that that decision gave you cause for considerable soul-searching.)
I know it’s more work, but please consider the following proposal-
That you create a spam-bucket where posts from sky-dragons and the bots might go; accessible to readers but not cluttering up the comments page.
Doing this will be worthwhile for four reasons. It will return you to the moral high ground of being superior to the alarmist blogs in terms of openess to contrary views. It could be very funny because it would include the ‘climate reality’ among other spam. (Big boobs and climate reality, anyone?). And finally, since not even an alarmist is necessarily factually wrong in all ways at all times, someone will be able to cite (and/or rebut) their stuff.
Also, we might get some interesting stats on what ruffles their feathers.
Please consider it.

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